Some advice from the Dreaming Spanish FAQ website page I find very applicable and reasonable. (As in, if you want learn by using extensive reading/listening to stuff you mostly understand, but don't care about sticking to DS Method and may use other resources too)
What’s the best way to learn if I already speak another Romance language?
If you are a native or proficient speaker of another Romance language, your journey will look very different.
An initial easy win will be getting used to the way the language sounds. Romance languages have many cognates, but at the beginning they will be hard to recognize. Once you get some familiarity with the pronunciation and with the patterns in which words change from one language to the other, your comprehension will skyrocket in a very short amount of time. Just by watching just a handful of hours of intermediate or advanced videos about topics that you are familiar with or that interest you, you will get used to the pronunciation enough and will have learned some of the most common connector words, and that will help you increase your comprehension a lot in a very short time. This phase may be slightly longer if instead of Spanish or Italian you are learning Portuguese, or especially French.
After this, you may find that some native media is already accessible. We recommend you start watching or listening to things about topics that you are already familiar with. Presentational content like podcasts, TED talks, or nonfiction audiobooks will be some of the easiest things for you to understand.
Once you can understand native media well, we recommend you continue watching our advanced videos only if you are genuinely interested in the topic that we are discussing and if you find them more engaging than the native content that you can understand well.
Pretty soon you’ll get to a point in which you can understand most native media outside of very specific things like very slang-heavy conversations in movies.
Crosstalk is also a great thing to do no matter your background.
Production is a whole different thing, though. Even though you’ll be able to understand most things thanks to the similarity of the vocabulary and grammar, you still need to specifically acquire the words, expressions, and the grammar of the new language. You'll still learn to speak the language faster than somebody who doesn't know another Romance language, but don't expect your speaking to improve nearly as fast as your understanding. Even if you can understand most things after a few dozen hours of input, you’ll still need to get a few hundred hours of input to be able to have conversations without too much trouble.
This is very applicable to me (I can read in French so not a proficient speaker but I have noticed this learning pattern in my own learning Spanish).
So if you already know a romance language, once you notice cognates you CAN use them to understand stuff. As far as Dreaming Spanish method is concerned, this way of understanding is fine (so instead of tons of images and gestures at the beginning). So ANY content you understand, from ANY prior experience (such as knowing cognates or - I wil extrapolate, from prior class study or anki study etc of a language, from being familiar with the topics the video is about, from seeing/hearing it before in a language you understood), will work fine for learning a language.
ANY content you understand the main idea of, no matter what is contributing to that understanding (in terms of past experience, visuals, cognates, topic familiarity), you can learn from.
I was curious what DS had to say about this, since for Beginners the lessons are typically visual heavy and made to be understood from visuals alone. But many people who switch to using extensive comprehensible input to learn are upper beginner or intermediate learners (with some vocabulary from prior learning, some media they can already understand) who are transitioning to simply doing more in ONLY the target language and less intensive study with textbooks/flashcards/lookups etc. So from my interpretation, it looks like DS is simply suggesting (for those types of learners): simply find stuff you understand, any stuff, and watch and read and listen. (Which is like a lot of advice for intermediate learners in general, no matter what they did to study the basics).
The other FAQ question I found interesting was the one on how to learn a language with very little CI. I think Peter Foley's paper on learning French with only audio visual materials is a good example of *the most extreme way* to try and do something like DS when there's no CI Lessons for beginners. However, the recommendations DS gives are much more similar to study methods like Refold (or, more broadly, like study plans MANY people end up doing - a mix of explicit explanations so they can UNDERSTAND some stuff, and then a mix of intensive and extensive listening/reading).
"What can I do to learn a language for which there are no easy videos like yours?"
The first thing that you should do is to try to find partners to do Crosstalk with. Crosstalk is the most efficient way to acquire a language, even more than our videos.
Other than that, you may have to use native content and use some of these techniques to make the input more comprehensible:
Watch content that you have already seen before in your language.
Look up words you’ve encountered several times.
Use translators to help you figure out the parts that you can’t understand.
Use parallel readers. Parallel readers are books that have been translated, and in each page one side is in one language, and the other side is in the other language.
Accept that since your level of comprehension of the input you are receiving is low, you’ll make slower progress.
My comments: you may notice all of these are recommendations Refold gives for making immersion more comprehensible. Refold would just add *study the most common words* (often with anki deck but any way) and possibly *study sentences/grammar* (often also with anki decks but not always, sometimes it's reading a grammar reference, sometimes its just looking things up while immersing like one of the points above says).
You may also notice a lot of these strategies are intensive reading (reading and looking things up, comparing the original with translation), and intensive listening (looking things up in shows and audio-only when you don't understand enough to grasp the main idea).
So, from my perspective, DS suggests using translations and looking things up is fine if you need to do it. It's not "purist Dreaming Spanish method" but Pablo recognizes it works too. If you don't have comprehensible input lessons as a beginner (which I imagine he thinks would be more ideal) then good old fashioned explicit translations and explanations to understand SOME stuff to use for comprehensible input, is fine.